Something too should be done with the existing professions to make them worthy of honourable ambition.  One of them, the Church, is a noble body without a soul; the soul, our nostrils tell us, died some time ago, while the medical profession has got a noble spirit with a wretched half-organized body.  It says much for the inherent integrity and piety of human nature that our doctors persist in trying to cure diseases when it is clearly to their self-interest to keep their patients ailing—­an anarchic world, this English one, and stupefied with self-praise.  What will this professor of AEsthetics make of it?

Here he is, the flower of English University training, a winner of some of the chief academic prizes without any worthy means of earning a livelihood, save perchance by journalism.  And journalism in England suffers from the prevailing anarchy.  In France, Italy, and Germany journalism is a career in which an eloquent and cultured youth may honourably win his spurs.  In many countries this way of earning one’s bread can still be turned into an art by the gifted and high-minded; but in England thanks in the main to the anonymity of the press cunningly contrived by the capitalist, the journalist or modern preacher is turned into a venal voice, a soulless Cheapjack paid to puff his master’s wares.  Clearly our “Professor of AEsthetics and Critic of Art” is likely to have a doleful time of it in nineteenth century London.

Oscar had already dipped into his little patrimony, as we have seen, and he could not conceal from himself that he would soon have to live on what he could earn—­a few pounds a week.  But then he was a poet and had boundless confidence in his own ability.  To the artist nature the present is everything; just for to-day he resolved that he would live as he had always lived; so he travelled first class to London and bought all the books and papers that could distract him on the way:  “Give me the luxuries,” he used to say, “and anyone can have the necessaries.”

In the background of his mind there were serious misgivings.  Long afterwards he told me that his father’s death and the smallness of his patrimony had been a heavy blow to him.  He encouraged himself, however, at the moment by dwelling on his brother’s comparative success and waved aside fears and doubts as unworthy.

It is to his credit that at first he tried to cut down expenses and live laborious days.  He took a couple of furnished rooms in Salisbury Street off the Strand, a very Grub Street for a man of fashion, and began to work at journalism while getting together a book of poems for publication.  His journalism at first was anything but successful.  It was his misfortune to appeal only to the best heads and good heads are not numerous anywhere.  His appeal, too, was still academic and laboured.  His brother Willie with his commoner sympathies appeared to be better equipped for this work.  But Oscar had from the first a certain social success.